News & Events

Training in Musical Improvisation May Teach Your Brain to Think Differently new paper in Psychology of Music see writeup on this work at Skilled Improvisers Detect Easy-to-Substitute Chords Faster than Non-improvisers, Says Study

Professor Paul Sajda gave a keynote talk on Brain Computer Interfaces and Augmented and Virtual Reality at the annual IEEE International Conference on Consumer Electronics (ICCE) . Each year ICCE is co-located at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas.

Paul Sajda, professor of biomedical engineering, electrical engineering, and radiology, has been named a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS). He joins three other Columbia faculty members who are among 391 new fellows awarded this honor, which began in 1874, because of their efforts to advance science or its applications. Sajda was cited for his “distinguished contributions to the understanding of neural correlates of vision, human perceptual decision-making, and cortically coupled computer vision.” View full article

In late 2015, IEEE created the IEEE Brain Initiative (http://brain.ieee.org) with the mission to facilitate cross-disciplinary collaboration and coordination to advance research, standardization, and development of technologies in neuroscience to help improve the human condition. IEEE is in a unique position to leverage its broad expertise in electronics, communication, sensors, power management, and other technologies to bring an engineering and systems perspective to worldwide activities that are focused on understanding and interfacing with the brain. For example, the IEEE Brain Initiative is coordinating standardization and technology development activities with the US-led Brain Research through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies (BRAIN) Initiative and EU-led Human Brain Project, as well as initiatives that are underway or being launched in Japan, Australia, and China.

NEDE (pronounced “Neddy”) is a scripting suite designed at Columbia University to leverage the capabilities of the Unity3D game engine into the neuroscientific study of realistic scenarios. Unity is one of the most widely used 3D game engines – its extensive documentation and user forums make it relatively easy to pick up, and its flexible scripting abilities make it highly customizable. NEDE adds a series of scripts designed to provide the features that neuroscience experiments require: randomized stimuli, precise timing, and peripheral hardware. NEDE’s capabilities include: View full article

The overall mission of Columbia University’s Center for Neural Engineering and Computation (CNEC, pronounced “scenic”) is to 1) cross-link multiple laboratories in the School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) that are developing new types of engineering and computing tools for studying the nervous system, 2) provide an interface and representative organization for SEAS efforts in neuro-engineering/computing to the rest of Columbia University and other institutions, and 3) provide an organized structure for developing a comprehensive academic curriculum for computational neuroscience education at both the graduate and undergraduate level. View full article

Objective. As we move through an environment, we are constantly making assessments, judgments and decisions about the things we encounter. Some are acted upon immediately, but many more become mental notes or fleeting impressions—our implicit ‘labeling’ of the world. In this paper, we use physiological correlates of this labeling to construct a hybrid brain–computer interface (hBCI) system for efficient navigation of a 3D environment. Approach. First, we record electroencephalographic (EEG), saccadic and pupillary data from subjects as they move through a small part of a 3D virtual city under free-viewing conditions. View full article

The nine articles, by leading researchers, provide expansive coverage of the signal processing methods, technology developments and application developments at the forefront of this emerging field. Details can be found here

Dr. Shuyan (Linda) Du successfully defended her thesis entitled “Machine Learning for Recovering Spectral Signatures of Disease” and Dr. Adam Gerson successfully defended his thesis “A System for Single-trial Spatiotemporal Analysis of the Electroencephalogram based on Linear Discrimination”. We wish both Linda and Adam the best of luck in their future research.

The goal of the project is to interface single-trial real-time neuroimaging with computer vision algorithms to improve object recognition and image search by humans. Columbia co-Investigators include Truman Brown (BME and Radiology) and Robin Goldman (Radiology). Outside collaborators include City College of New York, Oregon Health Sciences University and Siemens Corporate Research. The one year award is for $757,996.

Shuyan Du has been selected as a Finalist for the Best Student Paper Award at this year’s IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Conference (EMBC) in Shanghai CHINA for her submission, S. Du , P. Sajda , R. Stoyanova , T.R. Brown (2005) Recovery of Metabolomic Spectral Sources using Non-negative Matrix Factorization, Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society, 2005, Conference Proceedings. She will receive a $1000 prize for offsetting conference fees and travel expenses and will give an oral presentation on September 2nd where she will compete for the top prize.

The goal of the research is to combine functional neuroimaging with computational modeling to understand how contextual information is exploited at multiple levels of visual processing and analysis. The grant is for a 5 year period.

The goal of this grant is to develop a set of analysis tools, including blind and semi-blind source separation and matrix factorization methods, to recover signatures of metabolic processes in biological fluids. The grant is for a period of 3 years.

This is an R21/R33 Phased innovation Award with the objective of developing a new type of functional neuroimaging system based on the simultaneous acquisition of fMRI and EEG for application to the cognitive neurosciences, in particular the assessment of normal and abnormal cognitive aging. The total award is for $1.4M.